Opera and Society in Italy and France from Monteverdi to Bourdieu (review)

This is the second collection of essays in as many years in which Herbert Lindenberger has issued a call for a paradigm shift in scholarship on opera. In a chapter in Operatic Migrations: Transforming Works and Crossing Boundaries (2006), he sketched an argument for the development of what he terms "opera studies," an independent, albeit thoroughly interdisciplinary, field of inquiry that might break the traditional musicological monopoly on opera and open itself to opera's heterogeneous demands. In his chapter in Opera and Society, Lindenberger fleshes out some of the possibilities of this new field, at once acknowledging the strides already taken in recent literature on opera and reflecting on the blind spots that remain, particularly within the study of opera's social dimensions. This, he rightly argues, is a focus that has really only emerged in the last two decades, as opera has begun to attract scholars from a range of humanities disciplines and as musicology itself has opened up to new ideas (303).

Part of the task lies, as Lindenberger and other contributors to the collection acknowledge, in arriving at workable definitions of "opera" and "society." When he wonders, for example, what might happen if we "allow the terms 'opera' and 'society' to jostle against one another" (295), he could be speaking for many of the contributors to the collection. But the terms and outcomes of this "jostling" vary starkly from one author to the next. So, while Lindenberger sees society as the more "fluid" of the terms and contrasts it with the "constancy" and "easily defined history" of opera (294), Antoine Hennion draws on the work of John Blacking to make the more polemical assertion that neither music nor society exist (330). What he means, of course, is that neither term is self-sufficient—as though it were "'already there' as a reservoir of factors and determinisms" (331). Rather, each is conditioned by the other and materializes only in reciprocal fashion. And while editor Victoria Johnson worries that specialized scholarly interests lose sight of the "original historical unity" of the practices associated with operatic production and consumption (1), John Calhoun warns in the book's preface of the danger of considering opera in isolation: "the operatic tradition is not just internal, not something that can be grasped only by attending to opera" (xxix). "Jostling" indeed might be seen as a wider metaphor for the relationships between these essays. It is to the editors' credit that they have allowed this diversity to stand without attempting to paper over the cracks. Instead, the book's coherence emerges both at a more immediate level—the cultural/geographic restriction to case studies based on opera in France and Italy—and at a deeper methodological level—the strong emphasis on scholarly reflexivity (itself an incentive to acknowledge rather than smooth over scholarly differences).

Both unifying aspects can be related to sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, who, as the editors and several contributors remind us, has been strangely overlooked in scholarship on opera. The reflexive nature of Bourdieu's own work—his Homo Academicus (1984) is essentially an ethnography of French higher education—is reflected in the book's title, which subverts title conventions (shouldn't it be From Monteverdi to . . . Ravel?) and provocatively inserts the theorist into the body of operatic knowledge. Of course, the fact that Bourdieu had planned, before his fatal illness, to attend the conference on which the collection is based suggests another motivation for the title. But his voice is also clear in Johnson's introduction, with its patient mapping of the book's disciplinary terrain. Johnson relates the book's first two sections to what she argues are two of the principal recent modes of scholarly engagement with opera: a focus on the "systems of meaning . . . that have shaped the production and reception of operatic works in specific historical contexts" (15) and a focus on the "material conditions of operatic...